California drought, visualized with open data | Hacker News Reader

California drought, visualized with open data

cida.usgs.gov

80 pointsalmost_usual16 comments

This presentation format was terrible, which is a shame with so much interesting data to present. Kudos to the data research, but please consider re-publishing in a sane format.

I agree totally, I switched to FF to see if that would help but sadly it doesn't. The data is awesome, but presentation really makes it impossible to see.

I wish the data were near real time, I knew this was a bad drought, but what I was hoping to see was what impact the last few rains have made on the supply.

Agree too - so the reservoir data goes up and down but I don't know what that's supposed to be illustrating, same with the other stuff like snow packs.

I hoped to see something that would make me think 'wow that's serious' but it doesn't seem clear to me.

Interesting that irrigation is the largest use of water at ~60%, but livestock and industrial are only 0.5% and 1.5% respectively. I would have thought livestock and industrial use would be larger. Is this distribution of water common in other states?

Probably not. Agriculture in the western US relies on irrigation due to water scarcity, but places like Iowa have the opposite problem. They actually shunt water off of their fields. Also, losses of agricultural water due to evapotranspiration are higher in CA than in a state like WA due to the hotter, drier climate in CA.

Grass or grazing and hay and grain for feed are irrigated.

It would have been neat if the back tracked it. Water used to grow feed for cattle should have been attributed to livestock not corn/hay..

Bummer, data ends right before last major storms rolled in. I would like to see how this data has changed over the course of the last week.

USGS Water Year runs from October 1 to September 30 (of the next year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_year

You can find realtime data from LA Aqueduct sensors over at http://api.thirsty.la

I always like to plug my own scrappy scraper here when water issues come up in hopes that someone else might do something more exciting with the data.

Note that the samples are a couple days old - their sensor network sometimes goes down, and I get the opportunity to correspond with the kindly LADWP IT staff every so often.

Permaculture & other forms of sustainable agriculture really needs to be a part of this discussion. Natural ecosystems retain water on the land and increase rainfall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBLZmwlPa8A

The east coast has lots of people & lots of trees. California has lots of people and not many trees.

Why does scrolling the page change the timeline? confused

'Firefox is recommended for the best viewing experience' weird

This does not work well on mobile

It didn't work well on desktop either. I can't wait until the "navigate to different things as the user scrolls" trend dies—this would have been SO much more effective without that.

Argh, this page is terrible. I do not give you permission to hijack my scrolling mechanism. Stop it. Stop it now.

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